Miles To Go Before I Sleep
by AndromacheTakaya
Summary: Time passes quickly when there is nothing to fill the void. a century can fly by when there is only wind and misery to keep you company. but Vladislaus has found a new challenge to will life into his fallen limbs...a new chance to fill that void...
1. Chapter 1

Chapter I- Wind and Laughter

She sat quietly in her darkened room, as she had often done for years, looking out of her window into the night and relishing her solitude. Adrina had spent much of her life as a shadow among the world. She drifted through her school, though it suffered none for it, and she had taken a great liking to science and history. She smiled when others were happy, which was often if she could see to it, and kept to her own thoughts the rest of the time. She read incessantly, most of it fantasy. She loved to watch the night sky, as though it would divulge some secret that it hid from her.

There was a soft tap at the door, and she turned reluctantly away from the window.

"Come in." she called, and the door opened. Her father, Alexander Bramwell, stepped into the room. He didn't turn on the light, only allowed the light from the hall to illuminate his daughter's face.

"Are you ready for tomorrow?" He asked. Adrina's face brightened

"Yes," she said, smiling warmly. "Am I going to get to be one of the first to tour the ruins?"

Alexander was a historian and an architect who studied various ancient buildings, European ones in particular. Some times he would take his daughter along with him, because she understood his love of history. This journey would take them to the Carpathian Mountains.

Her father laughed.

"My dear, you'll be one of the first to set eyes on it in hundreds of years!" he told her. "And we'll be taking the quick way in. I hope you packed warmly."

---

It wasn't until Adrina was in the plane flying low over the snow-capped mountains, almost eighteen hours later, that she realized what he had meant.

"Are you sure a historian should be doing his work like this?" She yelled to him over the noise of the engines and wind as they strapped her to a parachute.

"Indiana Jones does stuff like this all the time!" Her father called back, a wide grin spread over his goggle-covered face.

"Indiana got to save the world!" She retorted. "Where's our calling?"

"This is it!" Her father said. Then the signal was given, and they leapt out of the airplane. Adrina looked back as the plane quickly got farther away, and she saw that they were also sending crates of supplies down with them.

She counted to ten, and then pulled the string on her chute. It didn't open. She pulled harder, fear beginning to beat at her, rising from her belly in a slippery knot. Still, it didn't open.

"Help!" she screamed, but her father had already pulled his chute and couldn't hear her. She plummeted, the mountains rushing to meet her. She could see below the dotted spirals of a grand fortress. How sad she was that at this rate, she would not be able to see it in its full majesty, but be impaled upon one of the turrets.

"No, no, no." she thought frantically. "So much to see. So much to do. I can't die. Not like this!!"

A sudden, strong gust of wind came up from beneath her, pushing her upwards. At the same time, there was a sharp tugging at her back, and the parachute sprang loose.

She breathed a sigh of relief as she looked up at the billowing chute. The strong wind left as quickly as it had come, but as it died she heard a soft, humorless laughter that echoed in her mind…

On the ground, her father came up to her to help her unhook her harness, his face showing concern.

"Cutting it a bit close aren't we, dear?" he asked her. "You were far closer to the ground than you needed to be before you opened your chute."

"Sorry Dad, I was just having too much fun free-falling." She lied. Something, she didn't know what, compelled her to keep her little misadventure a secret.

"Don't do it again." He said, turning to the rest of the party to see about arrangements.

She nodded, and walked towards the ruins that stood behind their gear and supplies. It was truly a wonderful and powerful piece of stonework. The door, still intact and wonderfully preserved, stood a good twenty feet tall, giving the person entering the feeling of insignificance. The location itself, on an icy flattop of mountain, isolated from all other forms of life and civilization, did a great deal to make the guest feel uncomfortable.

She glanced back at her father, and then began creeping towards the entrance. But a heavy hand fell on her shoulder before she could get to the bridge. Stanly Weldon, a tall gangly man with a scruffy beard, stood looking down at her.

"Not yet, young lady." He admonished, but he was smiling. "What have we told you, for years, about going off in these places alone?"

"Not to go without a grappling hook and a pistol, in case the mummies attack?" she joked. Stanly laughed, shaking his head.

"At least get some lunch before you go looking for trouble." He said. "It will only take an hour at most to set up everything. And we'll have it all inside the entrance. You can wonder off after that."

He steered her towards the supplies to enlist her help, which she gave without protest. But she looked back at the wide, gaping door one last time, feeling as though there were eyes on her.

---

"When was this place built, Dad?" Adrina asked her father as they set up. The entrance hall alone was quite large. If it entertained a ball room like many castles did, it would be grand indeed.

"We're still working on that, Love." Alexander replied. "We haven't been in many of the rooms yet, but it looks like it was built around the late fourteen hundreds."

"It's stood rather well for being over five hundred years old." She commented, looking around at the dingy, icy walls.

"Yes, it has. But that doesn't mean it hasn't gone rotten in places." He said, turning on the gas generator at last. Lights and heaters around the room turned on, illuminating the place and filling it with a soft electric buzz.

"Are you giving me permission to go?" Adrina asked, beginning to bounce with excitement. Her father handed her a flashlight and a two-way radio.

"Have fun." He said. "Call if there's a problem, and be back here by five, and we'll eat before we have a good start at this place."

Smiling, Adrina darted up the wide set of stairs out of the entrance hall, her father watching after her before returning to the set up. She wandered through the first hall, switching on her radio and flashlight, shining the light over the walls. Ice clung to them in places, where once they might have been damp.

The first room was empty, a second hall like the entrance. On the opposite walls from her, there were a series of doors to choose from. A soft, strangely warm breeze came from a door that had been broken in, and she followed that one, noting that this door was adorned with a grinning gargoyle with wings spread wide on either side of the door frame.

Her footsteps echoed as she stepped through the shattered pieces of door into the room beyond.


	2. Chapter II

Chapter II- Ice-Covered Remains

His skeleton didn't change. He had discarded it long ago, no longer caring for the feel of being encumbered by the hollow weight. There was no point to it. So he drifted through the empty halls, the ruins of his prison, every now and again checking to see if there was any change to the bones he might one day return to. There never was. Nothing did. The perpetual freeze of time and ice served only to let him drift farther away from reality and feeling…not that he felt much anyway…

It was somewhat comforting, being no more than a ghost. You weren't burdened with the weight of a body….

He drifted, upside-down, through the halls. It had once been comical, moving around at odd angles. The comedy had worn thin long ago. The only interest he had now was the leaps science was making outside of his isolated world. The first time he learned how very far it had come was in 1987, when there was a routine flight to Bucharest that flew close over where he was.

They were called planes. Another leap in science! Now people could fly with even less effort than he had! No one considered it a sin to do what only angels and demons were meant to anymore. Even more stunning, most of them held no trace of the dark superstitions that the villagers had once. They believed, lived solely on, what science provided them with. They no longer trusted to God to save them, but believed that He helped those who helped themselves, and so made great leaps in all forms of science. The buzz of minds flowing with knowledge was overwhelming, so he settled on one, the pilot.

The man's name had been Erik Galveston. He was thinking of how long it would be before he could go home to see little Amanda and his wife Christine. _Should find a desk job._ He thought as he maneuvered the plane. He sorted through the information. Over a hundred years had passed since anything of interest had come to pass, since his overwhelming failure.

He let it all fade out again. The horrible thing about his current state was that you couldn't sleep, couldn't shut anything off. You could, if you were skilled enough, shut out sound and go dormant for a time, but you could still _see_ everything, and never block out the constant wave of impressions on your senses from around you.

It was a scream that brought him out of his thoughts and the darkness of his mind. Not a physical scream, but something from a mind and a young, luscious heart beating frantically above him. A scream for help, and a mind thinking, pleading for someone to help her, that her _parachute_ wouldn't open. Curious for the first time in an eternity, he reached up and brushed against her mind gently. She was a young thing indeed, but strong of mind and heart, fiercely fighting, thinking of some way to save herself. Feeling unlike himself, he brought a gale up to meet her almost without thinking about it, then drifted up to inspect the pack that seemed to be giving her trouble. A strap was stuck in the release mechanism. He tugged it, letting it out. A great deal of fabric came out of the pack, and for a moment he thought he had done more harm than help, but it billowed out above her and nearly halted her descent completely.

He marveled at it as he drifted back into himself, noting more people and boxes descending to his home in similar chutes, drifting down from heaven itself. It amazed him so much that he laughed, feeling comfortable with the fact that no one could hear him. But as he drifted, he saw the woman's eyes widen and he know, somehow, she had heard him.

He couldn't help but wonder about this girl who had come to his home. She touched the ground, and it was as if a wall had snapped up between them. He could no longer hear her thoughts, only her heart, which was slowing to a less frantic pace.

They were ten people in all, with quite a bit of equipment sent down in similar _parachutes_ as the girl's. They landed on his very doorstep, bringing all of it inside. One of the men, tall with short brown hair and eyeglasses, walked up to the girl as she unhooked her pack. Her father, he knew after peaking into his mind. Though he could not read her, she made her emotions plain enough. She was excited. She told the others she wanted to look around the castle, to see what there was. He became eager. Perhaps this would be an interesting visit. If nothing else, it would serve as some entertainment…or food.


End file.
